Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:58PM
from the time-to-flush-your-system dept.

Barence writes "Smartphones are replacing PCs as the new breeding ground for pre-installed crapware, argues Mike Jennings. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, for example, comes pre-loaded with McAfee security software and other associated apps, four different app stores, and a selection of games and other media management tools. 'And it's not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it's there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don't uninstall any of the tat you don't want,' he adds."

Same here, but I've noticed that the non-removable applications and games on my old phone were buried under menus that I rarely used. On the new phone, well, they're right in my face and a fair number of them are little more than links to websites. Which is much more obnoxious.

Thankfully I can choose to bury that stuff in folders on my current phone, but how long will it be until they remove that capability? (After all, they do it to make money. You can't make money on what users don't see.)

The phone manufacturers are starting to make noises about making all the carrier imposed crapware uninstallable. HTC for one has publicly come out in favor of this.
the carriers get paid to put the csapware on the phones. The more heavily subsidized the phone the more shovelware on it.

Sure, but how much of it was slowing down your phone? How much of it was running in the background?

With an old clamshell, chances are those applications really aren't doing much to slow down your phone. With smartphones though, they are because they all run in the background even if you don't use them.

Chances are they're all hooked into your various online accounts too. I'm pretty good at verifying anything I'm going to install on my phone, but sooner or later users will get caught out by a security flaw in a badly coded piece of shoverware that they never even realised was installed. Less of an issue when phones basically made calls and sent text messages, much more of an issue when they're hooked up to online retailers/banking sites.

It is news. The news is that this only affects Android. Android has become the new Windows, home of viruses, malware, and pre-installed junk you can't remove. It's even worse than PCs due to fragmentation--the article mentions that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro (what a name) has four different app stores. When Linux fans cheer about some perceived victory through Android, they're really cheering the fact that carriers throw Android onto their cheap, flimsy phones and load it with a bunch of branded crap. That's not the victory we wanted.

Unless I'm missing something, this is exactly how my Android works, so if it's a new (or at least increasing) development on Android phones what's to stop MS doing it at some point too? At the moment they're fighting for market share, if carriers say they want this shovelware in order to promote the OS I can't see MS worrying too much about the feelings of users. Having said that, I have no pre-installed crap on my Android apart from the basics (market place, maps, a few utility apps like calculators and th

Even my regular old clamshell has pre-installed non-removable games and applications.

And worse. I've not bought a phone via a mobile network provider since getting one that Orange had deliberately broken the mp3 playback functions on. Without a hack (someone found the keys for the DRM so people could sign their own content with certain tools) you couldn't play anything as either a track or a tone without it having a digital signature - presumably they wanted me to rebuy all my stuff from their online store. What incensed me was that the advertising for that phone by that network played up t

Not if it's an HTC Desire. You can root it, but it's got some hardware thingie too - if you attempt to write to the area of flash that has the OS, then the hardware lock will not just refuse the write but immediatly reboot the phone. There are ways to overcome it, but it's a bit more difficult than your standard rooting.

Maybe so, but as root you can disable any or all the crap/bloat/malware you want with no penalty (I've often done so on my Desire). Just use Titanium or a similar app, or you can even do it from the commandline by calling 'pm disable...'

It's essentially the same thing as deleting the package, but it's a lot safer!

Untrue. Sony Ericsson phones can easily have all crapware removed with a simple root. Custom ROMs like CyanogenMod have had problems with driver support, true, but that's a different problem and is being resolved. The camera issue was fixed a week ago.

Please say those phones were for a team of people and that's not your personal experience because, if those were all your phones then you might want to look into a different manufacturer... One is a lemon, two is bad luck, three is a pattern, five is you're not paying attention. Heck, that many duds - even across a team of people - I'd be looking for a new manufacturer for my next set of phones...

Nope, all me. I am not rough on my phones, but I am very demanding, and don't accept regular faults as acceptable.

First one started random (~2/day) reboots after ~3 months.2nd had a failed touchscreen after ~2 months.3rd should have failed at QA- no keypad backlight out of the box.4th started randomly locking up after ~4 months.and now the 5th has a failed WiFi module (only 3G works) after 6 months. It's out of warranty, so I've stuck with it since, and it's been usable for about 9 months now.

I was told in the Sprint Store after I brought in my dead battery EVO, "your phone has a non-standard ROM installed which is fine, but we can't do any diagnostics on the software, we can only fix the hardware. If you need software support flash back to the Sprint ROM". They got enough of a charge in my battery that the EVO would charge it itself again, thankfully that issue has been fixed since it was a bit scary when it happened.

This is what happened with the WP7 mango beta, while the device was running the beta no software support was available, if you wanted software support you had to flash back, hardware issues were covered though.

Actually, if you look on XDA there'll be instructions for most devices on how to flash back to stock with a broken screen (timing, numbers of keypresses, etc). And if your USB port is screwed, you can still flash back through the SD card (which is the standard method, anyway)...

It's pretty difficult to be in a situation where you can't flash back to stock (not impossible, but very difficult)...

And you can't do a lot of non-standard things with an Android phone unless you root it.

Right. Your point?

If you're looking for his point then read his post in the context of what he is replying to, it should make sense, but just in case it was that both iOS and Android prevent you from removing those default applications.

What they are doing is in fact the opposite of bad. They are adding twitter posting as a system library, that applications can bundle in but do not have to use.

The reason why it's the opposite of bad is that Twitter is requiring the odious OAuth authentication protocol, which requires a number of stages to authenticate. Since iOS includes Twitter access as part of the core, it does all the Oauth stuff behind the scenes and all you have to do is enter a username and password.

That means that any apps that also post to twitter (which is quite a lot of apps these days) will have much simpler sign-in processes for the user to make use of twitter, basically none if you've logged in once anywhere else already (and before you get freaked out about background tweets going out know that the user has to confirm a tweet should go out before it is posted).

On the Mac side, there's iLife which gets bundled with new Macs whether you want it or not.

Which you can also simply drag to the trash?

It's not crapware I'd say if it's actually useful though!

I'd rather be a "hater" than a blind fanboi suckered by Apple's marketing into overpaying for crap hardware.

Funny, I'd rather spend my time using a computer than configuring it, paying about the same for the privileged. But whatever floats your boat.

It's also rather funny you call Apple users "blind" when it's you who apparently can't see with clarity what that are doing.

My last Mac came pre-installed with a demo of iWork. The one before that came pre-installed with a demo of Microsoft Office.

Then there's the stuff that a lot of people find useful but I just don't want. Some of which is quite easy to remove (e.g. iLife) and some of which is difficult or impossible to remove (e.g. iTunes). And don't get Apple wrong: iTunes isn't bundled as a wonderful media player. It is bundled to sell you more stuff (which is why most crapware exists).

What there are two of (well, three if you reinstall) are reboots - once after moving iTunes to the trash, and once again after emptying the trash. (And optionally a third if you decide to reinstall iTunes.)

Under Windows, the process is simply "go to 'uninstall a program,' select 'iTunes,' click 'uninstall,' and then needlessly reboot because Apple can't be bothered to look up how to remove services properly."

I'd rather be using my computer then fighting it because I have a need it's designer didn't envisage.

I'd never use a basic image manipulation program like Paint after all.

My 4 years of supporting Mac's in an enterprise taught me that Mac's have a very, very limited feature set and if you want it do anything different you're in for a world of pain that makes compiling the most obstinate Linux distro from scratch feel like a holiday.

The fact that it insists on trying to force iTunes and Safari on you when you install QuickTime is the reason I never install QuickTime on my Windows box. If actually requires it, I find an alternative that does not...

I'm happy with my N900, it runs true Linux, i.e. it allows me to install/remove any app I want, right out of the box, without the need to execute some 3rd party binaries to "jailbreak". But as we all know - most people love to be pulled through the mud (as long as they are made to believe they are being pulled through liquid gold by the hand that pulls them).

That may be true, but even with all their crapware, low-end Android devices are mostly faster than the N900, have a better selection of apps, require less end user knowledge of Linux and have a touchscreen that works in the way people expect it to ("Like the Eyefone!")...

Not sure what your comment is supposed to contribute, really... I like my guitars, and my bed, and my pants... oh and lasagna!

I have never understood the appeal of mindless games like Angry Birds.
The common app phone is such a wasted instrument. How much more it could really be. I will only use apps on my Android phone that I myself wrote.

Right. This is why you root your phone. It's to de-crappify it. You take that crap off. I love Cyanogen Mod! Shouts to Cyanogen and congrats on the new job!

Vendors of phones and network providers refuse to accept the very concept that you own your bloody phone and have a right to do with it what you want. It's the Bell system from the '60's and earlier (pre AT&T divestiture) all over again. They get to tell you what you can do with your property and you will smile and you will like it.

Freedom is nice. I like having the freedom to configure the phone the way I want, but that freedom usually comes with the necessity to do that configuration. On the other hand, Apple does not allow me to configure many of the iPhone's aspects... but it'll be fine right out of the box, without having to fiddle with it for hours on end. That's not because the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread; it's because it just offers what I want out of a phone. The user experience that Jobs dictates work

My phone came with some crapware too, and I can't remove it... but so what? The Kindle App? The Amazon.com shopping app? Some weird subscription GPS app that doesn't work as well as Google Apps? If I can't remove them, why wouldn't I just get over it and ignore them? It's not like they pop up when I don't want them to, like Norton Antivirus on a new PC. They just sit there. So what?

This is the problem when the device vendor makes a fatal mistake in judging who their customer is.

Almost all cases like this they assume that some 3rd party, whether some junk software maker like McAfee or in the case of phones, the carriers, is the customer instead of the end user. So instead of getting a good, clean product (and paying what it actually costs) you get a subsidized version full of garbage.

This is one reason I refuse to buy devices on contract, and why I build my own PC. Perhaps if the hands

PCs evolved in the wild wild west of arpanet, open source, even Microsoft had to deal with the explosion of possibilities, endless sources of hardware, software and content.

Telephones evolved for a century in the authoritarian straight jacket of Ma Bell, and phone companies are used to controlling every aspect of your digital resource, charging you for everything, forcing you to take what they want to give you. BUSINESS GET"S HARD JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS. The death of the PC will not be because of applicat

Ditto. Complain all you want about Apple's "Walled Garden," but I bet 95% of consumers would prefer not having that shovelware foisted upon them (especially the crap they can't remove) over the ability to play Ogg Vorbis or install a different operating system on their phone.

So that's why people are leaving their Iphone 3GS's for new Android handsets. The fastest selling OS is Android, people are buying it because it's better.

The overwhelming majority of PC user's couldn't care less about "crapware" but are finding each revision of Itunes worse then the last and are relishing the chance to be rid of it. The critical difference is that they aren't forced to jump through hoops by the crapware to do basic things.

The only reason Android is the fastest selling [i]phone[/i] OS (if you count tablets iOS is still on top), is because there are more manufacturers of Android phones than iPhones. As for people switching from the iPhone 3GS to Android, from what I've read there are just as many people switching from Android to the iPhone 4. People with AT&T are switching to Android and people with Verizon are switching to the iPhone (grass is always greener I guess).

Are you sure about this? According to this [gartner.com] there will be about 90 million iOS devices sold in 2011, and about 180 million Androids. Even if we assume those numbers are strictly for phones, that leaves a gap of 90 million devices.

According to this [bloomberg.com], Apple's selling fewer than 30 million iPads per year. And that doesn't even account for any of the popular Android tablets out there, such as the Xoom, the Eee Transformer, and the Nook Color.

They don't really support them - not in the same sense that Apple do with the iPhone. Most of the handset manufacturers are still very much stuck in a 10 or 15 year old mindset where they build the phone, put the software together and as soon as it's in mass production they hardly touch the phone's firmware (except in occasional cases of really heinous bugs, and not always then).

So that's why people are leaving their Iphone 3GS's for new Android handsets. The fastest selling OS is Android, people are buying it because it's better.

People are buying it because it's cheaper and the iPhone is not available on their carrier. If people were *leaving* the 3GS for Android, the iPhone wouldn't be gaining market share and the 3GS wouldn't still be the second best selling phone in the U.S.

If you really think that people are clamoring for the low-end Android phones because they think it's bet

So that's why people are leaving their Iphone 3GS's for new Android handsets. The fastest selling OS is Android, people are buying it because it's better

Andoid isn't "better" pe sé, but for a lot of people an Android phone is a better fit because:- they need some hardware feature (like a physical keyboard)- they are on a budget, and lots of Android phones are cheaper than an iPhone.

I'd say the iPhone is the best phone in its category, with Android expanding by filling the need for smartphones outside of that category where people are increasingly dumping their dumb phones for app-phones. This is also why there's constant speculation about Apple creatin

It may also be because Android based phones give you more choice than just four hand sets (of which just one current model). An iPhone is more than just iOS, just like an "Android phone" is more than just Android.

I won't stop complaining, because I don't want such a restrictive approach to impact my ability to use my computers (of any form factor) the way I want to- and Apple's moves are making that highly likely.

Actually, it's still worth complaining about, because there's a definite network effect here. While there are things Apple won't let me do with the iPhone that I want to do, the fact is, the more people use iOS, the more software development jobs are for iOS, and the more apps are for iOS -- and the more likely it is for a larger portion of these to be iOS-exclusive, and for at least one of them to be something I need...

This is exactly what happens with Windows. The more people use other platforms like cell phones or even Macs, the more companies are forced to migrate to something at least semi-portable, like the Web -- and the more I get to use stuff I want, like Android or outright Linux on the desktop. Or, failing that, at least we get the stuff that needs to be native on Android, too.

Except this would be worse than Windows. Apple is already going this direction on the desktop, and it really seems like too many people are moving in the direction of making iOS-like machines the norm... meaning the days when I can expect to buy a typical desktop computer and hack together some software to share with my friends may be numbered. The days a child can take the computer they have for other purposes and just use it to pick up software development may also be numbered.

So, complaining loudly about it, if it convinces anyone to avoid iOS and adopt anything moderately open, is still valid.

the more people use iOS, the more software development jobs are for iOS, and the more apps are for iOS -- and the more likely it is for a larger portion of these to be iOS-exclusive, and for at least one of them to be something I need...

Maybe its just down to the type of apps I use, but I've found the exact opposite really. I have an Android phone (a rather old HTC Dream that will need replacing before long) and my girlfriend has an iPhone 3GS. She sometimes gets annoyed that some free app I have on my Dream either isn't available (and seeming no equivalent app exists) for the iPhone, or that she has to pay for it whilst I got it for free. This latter point is more irritating when, not infrequently, the _same_ app from the _same_ vendor

You could just by a Nexus S that comes with vanilla Android and an unlocked bootloader you know. Pricing is a bit better than an iPhone.

Actually you can get unbranded phones easily in the UK. If you sign up via a third party like Phones 4 U they will give you an unbranded model instead of the branded one you would normally get when you deal directly with the phone company. That is how I got my Galaxy S, and it is largely crapware free.

I thought "fuck itself up because someone sneezed" was integral to the Windows experience.

Nope, just iTunes on Windows. Much more large and complex applications like Maya, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc... are all fine cross-platform, just seems Apple's developers aren't that good at writing Windows software or have tried to do a lazy port, but of course that is to be expected given they are obviously much more focused on OSX.

Sometimes I wish I could remove the Stocks and Weather apps built into my iPhone, but Apple won't let me, even though there are alternatives... I just have to stick them in a Crap I Don't Use folder on the last screen...

It depends on the quality and efficiency of the "Firewall", especially on a Portable Device. Even well known Security Software may be inappropriate in certain situations.

If the Software can't detect new threats (out-of-date definitions, no dynamic threat control) it is pointless having.If the Software is constantly running in the background, consuming CPU cycles, RAM, network bandwidth and Battery, it is less than useless; it is a liability.

It's not even just that. It's that it's not removable and it's crap nobody wants.

Safari isn't removable on iPhone. IE isn't removable on Windows Mobile. But nobody complains about those because they are intrinsically useful, and even if you don't like them, it's just because you prefer an alternative to the default.

The PC revolution (led by Microsoft - if you're old you might remember when they were the underdog) is over. MS was the first company to realize the benefit of giving users (some) control over their hardware. Remember that anyone?

Actually I don't.
I remember, before there ever was an MS-DOS or an IBM PC, that Apple shipped their computers with complete schematics and ROM listings which, I would say, amounts to "giving users control over their hardware".

The only reason Verizon are so popular is that they have spend vast sums of money buying spectrum (and in some cases exclusive rights in places like stadiums, subway systems, tunnels and other things) so that they can have the largest coverage footprint and can have coverage in all those places the other guys wont get.

If AT&T were smart, instead of investing big $$$ on LTE and high-speed-data, they would do whatever it takes so their coverage is as good as Verizon. And they would offer special deals to